That’s what estate taxes are for. The money they don’t funnel to their families or hide somehow is largely meant to return to the economic system to keep I healthy instead of just sitting in a pile gathering dust.
It's distributed according to their will or, if they don't have a will, state law (after the appropriate taxes are paid) - same as anyone else. They may have vastly more complicated estate plans, but the legal procedures are the same.
A lot of that money is in shares of his company, stock options, investments, etc. It's not cash. It's not like he has a giant money bin like Scrooge McDuck full of gold and people will be like "what do we do now?"
Also billionaires die all the time. And any number of things can happen with the wealth they leave behind. Often the shares get bought back or divested. Over time the family's personal stake in the company often diminishes sometimes down to basically nothing. The Walt Disney Company is a good example where the Disney family really no longer has any real stake or major influence.
Wealth often just passes down in some form to next of kin but it doesn't always happen that way. Many people have famously not left their fortunes to their children and instead given it to charity or bankrolled other companies (or governments). The US in general doesn't have a ton of multi generational super wealth especially if the younger generations don't really do anything to keep up the wealth or the mechanism that created the wealth. Today's Carnegies, Rockefeller's, Duponts and Vanderbilt's still have some decent money but it's a rounding error compared to their great grandparents. John D Rockefeller's personal wealth in the late 1800s was $900 million or $24 billion in today's dollars. That being said people like Elon have so much personal wealth, literally more than many countries entire GDPs, that we are in somewhat uncharted waters. I'm actually not sure what would happen with Elon's $191 billion.
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Something that a lot of people don’t seem to realize, even some of the answers already here included, are that net worth does not equal just a pile of money like a cartoon character with a pit of gold coins or literal piles of money.
Net worth is how much everything a person owns is worth.
Including things like real estate, intellectual property, and companies.
For example, Bezos owns about 10% of Amazon. That’s worth about 90ish Billion dollars.
That does not mean he has 90ish billion sitting in an account somewhere.
An analogy that’s more relatable to most people is that by owning a car, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone has 20k in cash at any one time. Their net worth is at least 20k, but net worth doesn’t necessarily mean cash.
Most of the net worth is from those stocks that they own, like Gates with Microsoft. He owned a lot of Microsoft. So when Microsoft gained value, so did he.
So the ownership of these stocks would change (and likely be worth less since someone like Bezos dying would likely lower stock prices) but it just means that part of the company would be owned by someone else.
FatOldRugbyDude t1_iybptfs wrote
That’s what estate taxes are for. The money they don’t funnel to their families or hide somehow is largely meant to return to the economic system to keep I healthy instead of just sitting in a pile gathering dust.